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About Into the Forest

Set in the near-future, Into the Forest is a powerfully imagined novel that focuses on the relationship between two teenage sisters living alone in their Northern California forest home.

Over 30 miles from the nearest town, and several miles away from their nearest neighbor, Nell and Eva struggle to survive as society begins to decay and collapse around them. No single event precedes society’s fall. There is talk of a war overseas and upheaval in Congress, but it still comes as a shock when the electricity runs out and gas is nowhere to be found. The sisters consume the resources left in the house, waiting for the power to return. Their arrival into adulthood, however, forces them to reexamine their place in the world and their relationship to the land and each other.

Reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, Into the Forest is a mesmerizing and thought-provoking novel of hope and despair set in a frighteningly plausible near-future America.

About Into the Forest

Set in the near-future, Into the Forest is a powerfully imagined novel that focuses on the relationship between two teenage sisters living alone in their Northern California forest home.

Over 30 miles from the nearest town, and several miles away from their nearest neighbor, Nell and Eva struggle to survive as society begins to decay and collapse around them. No single event precedes society’s fall. There is talk of a war overseas and upheaval in Congress, but it still comes as a shock when the electricity runs out and gas is nowhere to be found. The sisters consume the resources left in the house, waiting for the power to return. Their arrival into adulthood, however, forces them to reexamine their place in the world and their relationship to the land and each other.

Reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, Into the Forest is a mesmerizing and thought-provoking novel of hope and despair set in a frighteningly plausible near-future America.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

About Into the Forest

Once in a generation we open a new book to discover a voice and a vision that have the power to change the way we look at ourselves and our world. These are the novels we read, remember, and return to again and again: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, and now, from Jean Hegland, an extraordinary fiction debut…Into the Forest.

Eva, eighteen, and Nell, seventeen, are sisters, adolescents on the threshold of womanhood—and for them anything should be possible. But even as Eva prepares for an audition with the San Francisco Ballet and Nell dreams of her first semester at Harvard, their lives are turned upside down and their dreams are pushed into the shadows. In a nation suddenly without electricity or communications, Eva is compelled to dance alone to the music of memory, and Nell’s education consists of reading the encyclopedia, devouring knowledge as if it were her last meal. Theirs is an age of darkness and terror….

A distant war rages overseas. Resources society had depended on, such as gas and electricity, are no longer available. Riots spread through the inner cities, while deadly viral infections spread across the countryside. Isolated in their home in the northern California woods, Eva and Nell live in a world without television or phones, in a time of suspicion and superstition, of anger, hunger, and fear. Perhaps one day the lights—and their dreams—will return, but orphaned by their parents’ deaths and by society, Eva and Nell have been left to forage through the forest, and through their past, for the keys to survival. As they blaze a path into the forest and into the future, they become pioneers and pilgrims–not only creatures of the new world, but the creators of it.

Into the Forest is the gripping, unforgettable story of these remarkable sisters as they struggle to redefine themselves and their life together. It is a passionate and poignant tale of stirring sensuality, chilling insight, and profound inspiration—a novel that will move you and surprise you and touch you to the core.

From the Hardcover edition.

Praise

Praise for Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest

"[A] beautifully written and often profoundly moving novel."–San Francisco Chronicle

"A work of extraordinary power, insight and lyricism, Into the Forest is both an urgent warning and a passionate celebration of life and love." –Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade

*"From the first page, the sense of crisis and the lucid, honest voice of the…narrator pull the reader in….A truly admirable addition to a genre defined by the very high standards of George Orwell’s 1984."–Publishers Weekly,starred review

"Beautifully written."–Kirkus Reviews

"This beautifully written story captures the essential nature of the sister bond: the fierce struggle to be true to one’s own self, only to learn that true strength comes from what they are able to share together." –Carol Saline, co-author of Sisters

"Jean Hegland’s sense of character is firm, warm, and wise….[A] fine first novel." –John Keeble, author of Yellowfish

About Jean Hegland

Jean Hegland is the author of The Life Within: Celebration of a Pregnancy. She lives with her husband and three children in northern California on fifty-five acres of second-growth forest. She is at work on her next novel, which explores… More about Jean Hegland

About Jean Hegland

Jean Hegland is the author of The Life Within: Celebration of a Pregnancy. She lives with her husband and three children in northern California on fifty-five acres of second-growth forest. She is at work on her next novel, which explores… More about Jean Hegland

About Jean Hegland

Jean Hegland is the author of The Life Within: Celebration of a Pregnancy. She lives with her husband and three children in northern California on fifty-five acres of second-growth forest. She is at work on her next novel, which explores… More about Jean Hegland